


We Drew Our Own Constellations

by biggrstaffbunch



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Angst, F/M, Humor, Shenanigans
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-26
Updated: 2013-12-26
Packaged: 2018-01-06 04:15:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,750
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1102282
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/biggrstaffbunch/pseuds/biggrstaffbunch
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>Listen to all the translations of the stories across the sky.</i>
</p>
<p>Rose learns how to speak the language of a world inverted. After all, some truths are universal--time is always changing, and adventures are only what you make of them.</p>
            </blockquote>





	We Drew Our Own Constellations

|

 

Fingers tangled together and faces raised to the stars, the Doctor and Rose watch night fall over Bad Wolf Bay.

The sun sinks lower over the horizon and the ground is hard beneath their heads, but it's nice, lying on the ground and letting their thoughts get lost in the soft rush of waves against shore. It'd be almost peaceful, except for--

Well. Except for Jackie Tyler.

The Doctor's dark, "Figures," is drowned in the muttered exclamations coming from just further down the surf.

"Pete and his stupid Torchwood," Jackie says, sitting dejectedly next to a small and rather deformed sandcastle. "'Haven't got any cars right now, Jacks, infestation of overgrown larvae, Jacks, be there as soon as we can, Jacks, no, not the couch again, Jacks, _please_ \--" She throws a seashell. "This is what I get for marrying a man without all his hair."

The wind picks up and carries the rising and falling decibels of her voice, and Rose sighs, sits up. There is sand in her hair and determination in her eyes.

"She'll be on like this forever, I expect," she says, with the air of someone who knows. "Fancy a walk?"

The Doctor regards her seriously. "There aren't enough languages in the known galaxy to convey how much _yes_ I can say," he answers, and takes her hand.

Just like that, life begins.

 

|

 

Things aren't actually so different as Rose thought they might be, coming back to the parallel world. Just the same sense of disjunction, that's all. Coffee instead of tea, zeppelins instead of planes, faces that are familiar on people she doesn't know--

The irony of that last one almost makes her laugh, because in the end, two hearts or one, the Doctor is still the Doctor in all the ways that she remembers: a skinny man in a long coat (black instead of brown, but still--nice and swingy) and the proud (some would say smug) owner of a massive gob, a mind too clever by half, and a nose for trouble.

"Plus, some really great hair, Rose," he always adds, because he may not have a respiratory bypass system, but at least he still has some semblance of telepathic capability, and with an added side-effect of little to no regard for the concept of privacy.

"Plus some really great hair," she sighs, shaking her head and watching him shave his sideburns to an exact precision.

 

|

 

Surprisingly, there's dancing in the rain. Not so surprisingly, there's setting the kitchen on fire, too.

It's uncanny how someone can have such a zeal for life at the same time as having such an obvious _death wish_ , but somehow, as always, the Doctor manages to exist completely in spite of himself. He grabs her hand at the first sight of a storm (alternate London or no, it's still a London, and there's still rain) and no matter what is happening at that very moment, Rose can count on him opening the doors with a bang and the sudden downpour tilting over her head.

"Feel that, Rose?" he asks, through a snuffly nose and blinking eyes. "That's the sound of a heartbeat drumming into the ground. That's raindrops and lollipops and rainbows! That's just--that's _brilliant_ \--"

And maybe a little bit odd, but she doesn't say anything, just like she didn't that time he used an entire bottle of nail varnish on his toes just because he was feeling in a Scarlet Vixen sort of mood. Besides, this obsession at least keeps him out of her cosmetics. Mostly.

Instead, she holds his hand and aches with laughter as they splash through puddles like a pair of kids. Later, when he's sneezing and coughing and moaning piteously, it's not so cute, but somehow, passing her hand over his burning forehead and seeing him consume a whole sleeve of saltines with a side of orange juice makes it all seem a lot more worthwhile.

He never let her take care of him before, she realizes, or else she's never had the opportunity. This--not the "Tend to my genocidal twin," thing-- _this_ is what makes her heart go hot around the edges at the thought of keeping him forever.

And yet as charming as it is watching him fly through the torrents, lightning making his eyes a bright silver and thunder bringing laughter barrelling from his chest, it's all slightly less wonderful when he insists on sticking a spoon in the microwave, just to see things explode.

"Well, it's not as if we've got any planets to liberate, is it?" he asks, when the smouldering remains of the kitchen stare at her with accusing, empty eyes and he is scratching his ears sheepishly. The fire brigade just sort of square their shoulders and walk right in, because by now, it's a bit too routine to be _real_. "I was bored! And the fire was a small fire, a _tiny_ fire, a really pretty fire, actually, Rose--"

"That's it," she interrupts sternly, folding her arms. "We're getting you a job."

Jackie's somewhere in the background, yelling. Pete hears, however, and his frantic, terrified look is almost a prophecy.

 

|

 

"Does he even have a CV?" Jake asks one day, while Rose is muttering viciously at her desk and he is throwing darts at the wall. With Mickey gone, their little office feels empty, but Jake is welcome company (she won't say reprieve, she won't say reprieve) from the scowling, restless lump of a man currently sprawled out in her sitting room. "His only qualifications are fit for a place like Torchwood and, well, your Da's made it clear how he feels about _that_ one."

"Not in any circumstances barring total world annihilation," Rose recites under her breath, "And even then, he's got to be supervised." Her fingers twitch. "He's a bloody _genius_ , Jake. Knows more about science than anyone on Earth--his people _invented_ entire branches of physics. But he's also like a hummingbird on crack, and must be kept away from polite society. No one would hire him anyway, so _where_ do I look to get him gainfully employed, 'cause one more microwave we've got to chuck and my mum's going to do some exploding of her own."

"Try UNIT," Jake suggests. "I know that they've got a bit of a reputation of being run by a bunch of complete plonkers, but--hey." He shrugs. "Your Doctor might just fit in."

She throws a half-hearted ball of paper at Jake's head, but Rose suspects he might just be right.

"Oh," the Doctor says when she tells him that night. "Well. As long as this universe has got a Brigadier and a Bessie, it won't be that bad. 'S not exile this time, at least."

_Oh,_ Rose thinks, sadly and with a jolt, _but isn't it?_

|

 

He dreams about the other Doctor all the time. Rose knows because she does, too, and there's this weakened boundary between her and her human Time Lord, a mental membrane that's thinned out. She hears his dreams and he sees her thoughts and sometimes in the morning, they're both so bleary-eyed it's like they're a pair of zombies.

It's impossible not to think about what exists on the other side of a dimensional void. This Doctor is a part of her Doctor, his hand and Donna Noble's humanity and a sprinkle of circumstance bound up with all that superior DNA and the non-stop gob and the eyes that sometimes look so inwardly draw that they're almost flat. This Doctor is a summation of the sorts of things that she cannot begin to imagine, secrets and temper and a past that's not his own and part of himself that's missing and--and love. He loves Rose without a single doubt, the way he looks at her and talks to her and holds her when his words are just too-- _too_ much. His love for her is the only thing that he seems to really understand. Perhaps it would be, considering it's the only part of him that kept him here, that kept him from pushing the other Doctor away and hijacking his TARDIS. It's an honor and a burden and a terror to be loved that way. Some small part of Rose pines after the Doctor who was simpler, even in his complications, who was lighter, even in his darkness, who knew where he stood with her and so didn't make her ask herself where she stood with him. (Much.)

So the human Doctor dreams about a life he should have lived, and the human Rose dreams about a life she _did_ live, and though life trips along in a linear enough fashion, every now and then, they allow themselves and each other the luxury to close their eyes and look to the past.

 

|

 

There's no Brigadier in this Peru, but there's a Jack.

Hacking through the tropical forests of the Amazon basin, looking for the UNIT base that will give them some valuable technology salvaged by an ancient alien race buried under old Incan ruins, Rose passes a hand over her forehead and gives a short scream.

Bluest eyes she's ever seen, cocky grin curling full lips, dark hair and white teeth, and that perfect cleft in his chin--

"Jack Harkness! Blimey, I really _can't_ get rid of you!" the Doctor exclaims, and that's when he gets shot with an arrow.

It's only in the bum, so minimal damage, but the scar that will pucker on one pale buttock is enough to make Rose shiver. "That was ten kinds of unnecessary," she says, and her voice is so cold that the Doctor stops moaning and looks at her with interest. "Torchwood has got higher jurisdiction here, you don't go shooting their guests!"

"Hey, Torchwood isn't around when people are falling into holes and getting possessed and killing everyone in sight! _We_ are, and in fact, that guy I just shot? Is now a UNIT employee."

"The _hell_ he is," Rose begins heatedly, but the Doctor stops her by gingerly getting up, putting weight on his uninjured side.

"Oh, don't you worry, Rose. A dermal regenerator and some antiseptic and I'll be _rrrrrraaaaring_ to go." He gives an unimpressed sniff. "You lot do have dermal regenerators, don't you?"

There is a beat. Perhaps a shift of Jack's crossbow.

"No?" the Doctor asks innocently, subtly inching away. "Well, here's a trade--you give us the spatial temporal compressor, and I'll gift you with my extreme genius and build you a dermal regenerator. You'll need it what with some crazy person out there killing your men."

Because Jack agrees, Rose clears her throat.

"Oh, and we'll help you stop the crazy person, too," the Doctor adds absently, but he's already lost in calculations.

It's a real lesson in gingerbread houses, he tells Rose ruefully, once they fly back to London. "This universe could show me what becomes of people I traveled with, if I'd never traveled with them in the first place."

Those kinds of futures, Rose whispers, and means it with every particle of her being, are the kind not worth seeing at all.

 

|

 

They start sharing the same room when he begins to sleepwalk, unused to this physical need for rest and the accompanying dreams that keeps him from lying fitfully in bed.

Rose gets a queen-size instead of her previous twin, and plugs in a little machine that produces a steady hum of white noise. Neither of them are used to sleeping in silence, she supposes, because she's always missed the roll of the TARDIS all around her, and the Doctor's got that on top of being filled to the brim with habits and nightmares and calculations. And he can't get rid of a single one, getting up that first night to roam the halls because there's no winding corridors here, no garden or library or console room. He puts together the toaster and takes apart the radio and when he comes back, the glow in the room has gone curiously green.

Rose turns from the fairy lights strung up around her desk, and her smile is sympathetic, gentle with understanding. "You work around your memories," she shrugs, "and you learn how to live with what you have, rather than what you don't."

Her hand presses just above where his second heart would be, and her pulse is enough, for now.

 

|

 

He can reprogram and recalibrate fourteen different kinds of previously incomprehensibly-to-even-Mickey Torchwood tech, but the Doctor is still baffled by the telly. It'd be gratifying, to see the genius himself brought low by bits and bobs of human construction, if it wasn't so--well, pathetic.

"There's all these useless _buttons_ ," he insists, poking and prodding a sequence of numbers on the remote control. Onscreen, the image flickers rapidly not between outerspace serials, but between a rather silly-looking telenova and a Bollywood movie.

"Also," he continues, and his face darkens even more, "I can't understand anything that they're saying." He looks so miserable that Rose can't really laugh at him.

(Well. She can, and she does, but only a little bit. To herself. Sort of.)

"What," she asks, propping her hip against the sofa on which he's sitting, her expression fond. "You're not fluent in Hindi?"

The Doctor sighs and looks shifty. "I might have begun to rely a wee bit exclusively on the TARDIS, when it comes to translating Earth languages. I mean, I wager I'm still the only one in this solar system who could conjugate Judoon, but what good is knowing how to speak rhino when all around you, people talk like apes?" He scowls so sullenly that for a moment, Rose is tempted to ask if he needs a nap.

Instead, she arches a brow. "Haven't heard that one in awhile, you calling us apes. Always 'brilliant humans who invented hair gel' this and 'look at this wonderful species that put cheese in a spray can' that," she says mildly. "Mind, aren't _you_ half ape now? Better learn to love your mother tongue."

"Ah, yes," he mutters, flopping back on the sofa. "Chiswick-ese."

He points the remote and turns off the volume. Patting the seat next to him, he brightens and asks, "Hey! Want to invent dialogue for the pretty girl in red and her dancing lover?"

Rose touches his hair, delighted. "I'll go make some popcorn."

Life is full of little adjustments, she thinks later, throwing popcorn kernels at the Doctor and watching him struggle to catch them in his mouth. But that's the nature of change, and all in all--

Moving forward beats standing still.

 

|

 

They go back to Bad Wolf Bay once more, on a whim. They have days to spend now on endeavors such as this, after all, and when they get there, they lay a blanket out in the sand.

The moon hangs fat and full in the sky once night falls, and they begin to walk down the surf. Rolling their trousers up to their ankles, they leave their shoes lying carelessly in the sand, a small pair of black boots cradled next to a bundle of fading red high-tops. Their bare feet sink into the frothing waves while for a long time, the only sound between them is the distant rush of a crashing ocean.

"Let's tell stories," Rose says, gesturing to the sky, "About the stars." For once, though, the Doctor isn't the only one spinning tales about what lies behind the distant points of light, and Rose does more than listen and learn.

"When I was jumping between worlds, trying to get to you," she says, the breeze sifting its fingers through her hair and her skirt flying about her knees, "I saw so many places. Met so many people. Did so many things, terrible, wonderful, amazing things. It was like, reality was this window and all those possibilities were like cracks in the glass. I couldn't fix it fast enough, and I tried, you know, I tried so hard, but... I knew you so well, in those moments. My Doctor." She closes her eyes, and the words tumble out. "All the ones I couldn't save and all the ones I could--I can't forget their names and faces and I was so _lonely._ "

His hand slips through hers and she leans her head into him, drops a kiss against his shoulder. "Thank you for staying with me," she breathes, and smiles bright.

"Oh, Rose," he whispers into her hair. "Thank you for _wanting_ me to stay."

They're the same as they ever were, the Doctor and Rose. Like line drawings, waiting to be filled with the unknown, straining towards color, towards vibrancy, towards something _more._ Shadowed and dark, carved in negative space. But they're different, too--Rose knows what it is to be alone, in a way she never did before. And the Doctor, the Doctor knows what it is to be so fragile that he must go by the ticks of his utterly human heart instead of any number of regenerations. They are bound together by the vagaries of the human condition, and for the first time in so very long, they're living for the journey rather than the destination.

As they drive home from all the memories, Rose doesn't think of their last meeting on that beach, nor their first hello. She thinks of tonight, and of finally understanding something she thinks she always knew.

Years later, she will remember this as the night she fell in love with him.

 

|

 

"No."

"Rose, please--"

"I told you, no." She says, in as firm a voice as she can muster, "I am _not_ wearing that."

"Rose," the Doctor says, tone dangerously close to a whine, "Rose, but you _have_ to wear it, you promised your Mum!"

What he doesn't say, and what eventually prompts her to give in, however mortified she might be, is how much _he_ wants her to wear it, too.

Of course, when the costume party rolls around, Tweedledee and Tweedledum make their appearance. Fake moustaches and pillows stuffed down their trousers and all.

"Rose," the Doctor hisses, "Lighten up. I doubt that Tweedledee would look quite so--murderous."

Her only answer, amiably accepting her mum's exclamations over how _darling_ they look, is a quick yank at the thin line of hair curling over the Doctor's lips. She's unerringly sweet to him for the rest of the party, though, and if he was a smarter man in all the ways that counted, he might have seen her revenge coming.

But that night as he's struggling to dissolve the moustache glue, when she slips quietly into the bathroom and watches him in the reflection of the mirror, he simply grins at her, unaware.

"Hello, Rose," he says, and there is a soft sort of look around his eyes. He blows a few stray strands of synthetic hair off of his lips, and then smiles wider, winningly. "That's a very nice nurse's outfit."

She slinks closer, grabs him by the suspenders, and pushes as close as the pillow still in his pants will allow.

"I," she says silkily, "Think you need a doctor."

She swallows his laughter with a kiss.

 

|

 

"Alien invasions," the Doctor sighs, slumping over. "I really, really miss alien invasions."

Rose peers over her newspaper. "Hmm?" she asks, because sentences like this should never be encouraged when all an individual is looking to do is lounge about in her pyjamas and read the news.

Then, she thinks: Bugger _that._ With horror, she wonders when she got so boring.

"I miss alien invasions, too," she says feelingly, and the Doctor smiles.

"Come help me find some," he suggests, and taking his hand, clad in pink pyjamas with cows all over them, she does.

 

|

 

Incidentally, there are a lot more aliens trying to invade alternate London than Rose could ever have guessed.

She thinks the fact that they're all crawling out of the woodwork _now_ is probably owing to the fact that there's a Doctor in this reality, and wherever there's a Doctor, certain things tend to happen.

Certain things like giant mutant bananas chasing after her with murder on their giant mutant banana minds.

To be fair, the giant mutant banana is more hurt than angry, but still. As the Doctor somehow finds time to remind her whilst they run away, one must _never_ alienate a giant mutant banana.

"It's already an alien!" Rose snaps, tugging the Doctor's hand in the universal/interdimensional sign for _'run faster, you crazy loon'_. "You can't alienate an alien, that's a completely redundant play on words and oh my _god_ , how do giant mutant bananas even run?!"

"No, no, giant mutant bananas are different than aliens, and anyway, it _is_ possible to alienate aliens because aliens are people, too, except they're not, are they, and actually, it's sort of a sensitive issue about the legs," the Doctor pants as he runs alongside her, his fingers squeezing hers and his coat flapping behind him. "They've got their limbs tugged up in their protective skins, but unfold when they feel particularly threatened, or offended, or, you know, bored--"

"Hold on, what?" Rose interrupts, stumbles, momentarily thrown. "So--the rest of the time they just, like, roll? Wobbly little bananas, rolling all over the place?"

"Wobbly _giant_ bananas, Rose, have some perspective!" The Doctor leaps over a line of shrubbery, hoisting his arm around Rose's waist to help her over. They make it over with minimum effort and spare a few moments to look over their shoulders, where the banana is sort of--plodding--after them.

"Well, it's not very fast, is it?" Rose muses, suddenly embarrassed. "It's taking it's time, just a stroll through the banana grove. Why'd you tell us to run? I could've done with a moderate walk, _maybe_ a jog--"

The giant banana chooses this moment to pause, turn around, split the folds of his, er, _protective skin_ and take aim.

"This," Rose begins calmly, from under piles and piles of stringy yellow slime, "had better come out in the wash."

"Oh, just use Tony's baby detergent," the Doctor says cheerfully, scooping his finger through the slime and taking a taste. "He dribbles mashed bananas on himself all the time."

Rose responds with something that sounds suspiciously like "Your _face_ dribbles mashed bananas all the time--"

And then they're off, running for their lives.

 

_and the story goes on and on and on and on..._ (or in other words. the end.)

**Author's Note:**

> Reposted from Livejournal.


End file.
